Category: just a little bit of history repeating

  • autumn in New York

    untitled [ West Broadway 29/10/2013 ], digital photograph, dimensions variable, Mike Brookes 2013 – from the ongoing small pieces of everything series.

  • …almost time to leave

    untitled [ Firglade Avenue 23/10/2013 ], digital photograph, dimensions variable, Mike Brookes 2013 – from the ongoing small pieces of everything series.

  • walking

    As our final public work here in Providence, Rhode Island, today we walked the now ascent shoreline of the natural cove that shaped the original geography of this city – a body of water and salt marsh reclaimed and almost completely covered by developments of the city’s centre over the last 150 years. Accompanied and […]

  • introduced birdsong

    Today we conclude our Historic parking lots of Providence project, highlighting thirty of downtown Providence’s surface level parking lots that – contrary to assumptions that they are spaces of transition, neglect, or failed development projects – have in fact been designated as parking lots, and have remained unchanged and in use as such, since at […]

  • chorus

    As the low evening sunlight floods the studio, we are opening its doors, for the first public prototyping of some of our introduced birdsong boxes. Installed, in this case, simply as a single fifteen metre choral row along one wall of our temporary home here in Salina – waiting to be met and triggered… Image: […]

  • greetings from Salina

    Wrapping up one thread of our engagement with aspects of this city’s past and present – as both a playful exploration of the shifting character of downtown Salina, and an attempt to generate a tangible trace and record of the people we have met here – we have been inviting locals to join us in […]

  • bison stew, beer, and entropy

    Closing the fourth week of our residency here in Salina, we have spent this weekend with the Land Institute – a small but world renowned agricultural research centre sitting just outside the city, now almost forty years into its ongoing mission to develop hybrid perennial grain and oil seed crop species, and practices of polyculture, […]

  • still thinking about parking lots

    Fountain Street and Mathewson Street, pen and watercolour on paper, 100cm x 175cm, Mike Brookes 2013 – from the parking lots of Providence series. Further details from the parking lots of Providence series can be found in the archive [ here ].

  • postcard from the past

    Greetings from Salina [looking north on Santa Fe Avenue], one of a series of twenty digital images adapted from archived postcards depicting 20th century views of Santa Fe Avenue in Salina KS, dimensions and proportions variable, Mike Brookes 2013 – from the participatory image work Greetings from Salina / crossroads of the nation, part of […]

  • thinking about parking lots

    For the first time in quite a while, I find myself drawing as I think. I have never really sketched works, unless I need to describe them to someone else. I think them through, then make them. As usual, these drawings are really just another case of making more than one thing at once – […]

  • here we are…

    Eighteen months after the last public work in the series – in which we ‘revisited’ the now absent buildings of the former Euskalduna Shipyard in Bilbao – we have shifted our focus back to the development of our long term just a little bit of history repeating project. And for this phase, we have moved […]

  • a map to find meetings in places that aren’t there

  • time lapse

    Three photos of the just a little bit of history repeating site in Bilbao – firstly the working Euskalduna shipyard and docks, then its subsequent dereliction, and the present (the Guggenheim is nestling behind the tower block that now stands over one end of the site):

  • visiting absent buildings

    Rosa Casado and I are back in Bilbao, a city that we have begun to form a bit of a relationship with over recent years, having been awarded two separate residencies here, and now two public commissions. We will be based here for the next two weeks, as we complete a new located work from […]

  • a title recycled for works containing nothing new

    As I head off to Bilbao to meet ex-workers from the Euskalduna shipyards, who have kindly agreed to work with Rosa and I on the next work from our just a little bit of history repeating project – commissioned for this coming autumn – I have been revisiting some of the project’s previous thoughts and proposals, […]